Images of the Qing

Abstract

When I was first teaching the Qing field I gave a lecture that, as I thought, would introduce the Qing Dynasty to undergraduate students at the University of Washington. Unconsciously, I personified the Qing, and found myself saying “The Qing did this,” or “The Qing did that.” One student quietly raised her hand, and asked: “What is a qing?” The question stopped me short, for I didn’t have an answer. The easiest answer would have been “read your textbook,” but that didn’t come to mind at the time. I have since reflected on the question, it seems appropriate on this occasion to look back and also forward at these images. In recent years, I have found it useful in my teaching and writing to organize my understanding of the field into categories, based on what sort of regime scholars in the field imagined the Qing to be. In brief, I find there are three categories. When I first encountered the Qing, as a student in the late 1960s, the Qing was counted a failed dynasty. When I published my first book, it was the fashion to understand the Qing as an early modern state, engaged in same processes of state building as contemporary states in Europe. Most recently we have come to regard the Qing as an empire, with all of the complex nuances of imperialism and domination, control and subordination that phrase entails. This kind of Qing-as-empire history has come to be known recently as the “New Qing History.” Although we have learned much from the new Qing history, I fear now we must begin to consider a post New Qing Qing History. The facts of Qing history have of course not changed, though to some degree the documents we learn them from have. What has changed